Mourning Happiness – Narrative and the Politics of Modernity Soni Hardback

Mourning HappinessNarrative and the Politics of Modernity\nAuthor(s): Vivasvan Soni\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Cornell University Press\nISBN-13: 9780801448171, 978-0801448171\nSynopsis\nFor many eighteenth-century thinkers, happiness was a revolutionary idea filled with the promise of the Enlightenment. Vivasvan Soni argues, however, that the period fails to establish the importance of happiness as a guiding idea for human practice, generating our modern sentimental idea of happiness. Mourning Happiness shows how the eighteenth century's very obsession with happiness culminates in the political obsolescence of the idea. Soni explains that this puzzling phenomenon can only be comprehended by studying a structural transformation of the idea of happiness at the level of narrative form. Happiness is stripped of its ethical and political content, Soni demonstrates, when its intimate relation to narrative is destroyed. This occurs, para.